There Was and There Was Not: A Journey through Hate and Possibility in Turkey, Armenia, and Beyond

by Meline Toumani

  * * *

  KRIKOR’S CONVERSION ANTICIPATED a small but undeniable trend in Turkey—a trend of people discovering that they had Armenian roots. The movement found its foothold in a book published by a woman named Fethiye Çetin, a human rights lawyer who would go on to represent the Dink family in Hrant’s murder trial. Çetin’s book, Anneannem, or My Grandmother, told of how her grandmother had confessed, shortly before dying, that she was born Armenian. Separated from her family during the genocide, never to see them again, she had been taken in by a Muslim family when she was nine years old, and married their son, living out the rest of her years as an upstanding Muslim woman. The author, Çetin, was the only person her grandmother told about her true origins.

  The book gave voice to an open secret: around one hundred thousand children—most but not all girls—had survived the genocide only because they were brought into Kurdish and Turkish homes, usually as wives or maids, and converted to Islam. Some families spoke of this among themselves but concealed it from outsiders. Others knew in vague ways but never acknowledged it even in private. Many had no idea at all. Çetin’s book nudged the taboo open just enough that in the aftermath of its publication, some Turks started to admit that their grandmothers had been Armenian, too. It wasn’t a national coming-out; the shift was quieter than that. One man wrote in Agos that after his mother died, he discovered a tiny cross sewn into the collar of her nightgown. This was the start and end of what he knew. Several people told me privately that they had an Armenian ancestor, but unlike Krikor, nobody else I met had any interest in converting.

  And why would they? One of the worst and most common insults in Turkish was to call somebody Ermeni dölü—Armenian sperm. In polite conversation, it was translated as “Armenian seed.” People used it to accuse each other of lying, to scold children for mischief, and even, publicly, to criticize politicians for unfavorable decisions.

  Which begged the question: was Krikor crazy?

  By the time I met him, he was back in Diyarbakır. Istanbul was expensive, and besides, he had not felt particularly welcome in the Bolsahay community. Armenians eyed him warily. They knew better than anyone how strange it was for a young man to willfully join their ranks. And when Krikor started wearing a cross outside his shirt, instead of tucked beneath the collar, people thought he was reckless, maybe even dangerous.

  “How can you live when you hide yourself?” Krikor said. “They are so oppressed.” Then he corrected himself. “We are so oppressed.”

  Istanbul Armenians were paranoid as a rule. But Krikor was also cautious, in his own way. It took weeks of phone calls and several days of in-person coaxing, with Deniz at my side, to convince him to talk to me about his decision to convert. When we finally spoke, in a large, crowded tea garden in Diyarbakır, he made us change tables four times before he was satisfied that nobody was eavesdropping.

  I asked him why he had wanted to take on the burden of being Armenian.

  It was not a burden, he said. He searched a long time for the right word, and finally said it felt to him like asalet—Turkish for “nobility,” a term with ancestral connotations, hints of something bygone and beautiful.

  What about his Kurdish identity? Didn’t it mean anything to him?

  “What matters to me is to feel that richness of all those people from the past. Muslims, Jews, Christians, all of them used to live together in peace. If people all over the world only understood this…”

  The problem with Krikor’s sentiments was that they were based mostly in myth. And the same myth was used by people with the opposite intentions: to insist that Armenians could not have been persecuted because everybody had lived together in harmony. Of course ordinary people of all backgrounds had, in many cases, at many moments, on many blocks of many quarters, lived together without problems. But the age-old interreligious prejudice of the region was not unique to Turkey and could not be denied. I said this to Krikor: it was a nice idea, but it wasn’t really true that people of different religious and ethnic groups had always lived side-by-side in peace.

  “It was true in Diyarbakır,” he said. “I am more than one hundred and ten percent certain of it.”

  Later, I heard rumors that had spread around the Bolsahay community, rumors that Krikor, by appointing himself in charge of the church ruins in Diyarbakır, had been siphoning off donations from occasional visitors. Some people defended him: there was nobody else who spent time at the church, tending the shrubs and giving little tours. He had even built a Web site with photographs and stories about the church and the formerly Armenian villages.

  I couldn’t confirm whether Krikor had stolen money. And I would not have been surprised if his desire to become Armenian had more to it than a spiritual need or a passion for history. He was desperate to get out of the country to avoid military service, and he had become fixated on the idea that if only he could find an Armenian bride overseas, maybe in France or Canada, he would have a ticket out. He asked me for help applying to Armenian organizations for scholarships to pay for college abroad.

  Every year hence I would receive greetings from him on January 6, for Armenian Christmas, and again at Easter, with the requisite expression in Armenian script: Christ has risen, blessed is the resurrection of Christ.

  Maybe Krikor was bonkers. Or maybe he just couldn’t live with the sense of rupture inherent to life as a Turkish citizen. Maybe Krikor hoped that by converting, he could embody, within himself, a wholeness—a Turk, raised as a Kurd, now Armenian by some distant drops of blood—a wholeness that the current situation denied everyone.

  * * *

  MANY PEOPLE I met seemed to have developed some kind of coping mechanism to manage the rigid requirements of Turkish identity, each according to their own circumstances and character—but none were as extreme as my friend Tunç.

  Tunç was ethnically Turkish. He grew up in İzmir, with typical middle-class parents and a typical elementary school education, then went to high school, college, and law school all in France before moving back to Turkey as an adult.

  When I met Tunç (at a Lenny Kravitz concert in the Tünel district, as it happened), he was living alone in a stylish apartment in Nişantaşı, one of Istanbul’s tonier neighborhoods. On the surface, he had White Turk written all over him. He had no interest in politics and preferred to talk about film or a prospective trip to Thailand. His wardrobe looked like a J. Crew window display, and his home had all the latest features; he had installed radiant-heat floors throughout the condo and liked to make himself coffee using a high-end espresso machine. He afforded this comfortable lifestyle easily, because he worked as general counsel for the Turkish division of a leading American tobacco company.

  But ideologically he was as far from being a White Turk as could be. Actually, he was in a category of his own.

  After I had hung out with Tunç a few times, I asked him what he thought about the genocide.

  “It happened,” Tunç said.

  “How did you come to believe that? Was it something you read that convinced you?”

  “I don’t need to read anything,” Tunç said. “It’s obvious from the way Turkey denies it that it happened.”

  “But how come you see it that way, when most Turks don’t at all?”

  “I don’t consider myself Turkish.”

  Here was a person whose job was to defend, in courts, a giant, international cigarette maker, a company that spent billions of dollars peddling a drug known to hold its users in thrall no less than heroin (a drug, I should note, which Tunç himself never sampled, despite keeping cartons stacked up in his living room for visitors). He spent his waking hours in the legal department of an organization whose chief activity was to lie about what everybody knew to be true: that smoking kills. There was something bitterly nihilistic in Tunç, maybe even sociopathic, and yet something utterly, exhilaratingly pure.

  And Tunç did not consider himself Turkish. He insisted on this whenever I asked him questions about things Turkish people
said or did.

  “I don’t consider myself Turkish,” he would repeat, as if the matter had been resolved and the only complication was his birth certificate.

  In Tunç’s nihilism there was a clue as to what motivated everybody else. He didn’t ask for anything from Turkey, so he didn’t feel the need to offer Turkey—the idea of Turkey—anything in return. It was as if this distance between himself and his ethnic identity was the reason he was able to say something so remarkably simple about the genocide: I don’t need to read anything. It’s obvious from the way Turkey denies it that it happened. There were no scales to fall from Tunç’s eyes. He didn’t consider himself Turkish.

  But then we would stop to buy a couple of döner kebabs from a cart on the street, and Tunç would address the vendor as abi, brother, and offer an eyvallah—a bit of homey, religion-inflected slang calculated to reduce the chasm between a street food–seller and himself—and I would catch a glimpse of the child of a neighborhood in İzmir who hadn’t earned fancy diplomas in Europe just yet. Or he would give a disquisition on the relative merits of different styles of börek pastry, or marvel at the view from a particular point on the pier near Üsküdar.

  Tunç didn’t consider himself Turkish, but he was Turkish. It wasn’t a choice, and I am not talking about something as meaningless as the components of his blood. Turkey was the place of his birth, the language he spoke, and the home of the only family he had. He was Turkish, and why shouldn’t he be? It was unfair, and heartbreaking, that the label had become so narrowly defined that he felt his only option was to refuse it entirely.

  14

  Official History

  The Atatürk Mausoleum loomed over the city of Ankara. High on a hill, angled so that it seemed just above your head no matter where you stood, it was a massive block-like rectangle surrounded by close-set square columns, bordered by lights that bounced off the pale limestone and made the structure glow like it was the house of God.

  Ankara, Turkey’s capital, was as different from Istanbul as Washington, DC, from New York. Ankara meant government, the military, and Atatürk. Like Washington, it was a tidy, functional city where important things happened, but not a place you could truly love. It felt staid and conservative no matter the administration, and a bit too clean, with an early bedtime and all the closed-off dimensions that follow—not to mention quadrants of blight that were excised from its official image.

  The official image was what brought me to Ankara: I had a meeting with Yusuf Halaçoğlu, president of the Turkish Historical Society, a state-funded research institution founded in 1930. As president, Halaçoğlu had spent the past fifteen years producing an unending supply of books, reports, and press releases arguing that there had never been an Armenian genocide. He was Turkey’s denialist in chief.

  I had been naive enough to think it would be difficult to get an interview. I asked Müge’s advice about this when she was in town for a conference; do you think Halaçoğlu would be willing to talk to a diaspora Armenian?

  “Are you kidding?” She laughed. “I’m sure he would love nothing more.”

  When she saw I didn’t get it, she explained that a person like Halaçoğlu was like an evangelist, certain he had seen the truth and eager to share. He was not burdened by the kind of self-questioning I took for granted in myself, so being confronted with an opposing view would be a welcome challenge. In fact, there could be no more worthy pupil for his teachings than a polite, open-minded diaspora Armenian like me. By Müge’s assessment, our meeting would be his pleasure.

  Discussing the Armenian issue publicly was the central focus of Halaçoğlu’s career, and he appeared regularly on Turkish television to announce new findings. Shortly before my visit, he had unveiled his most creative discovery yet: the notion that almost all those in Turkey who considered themselves Alevi Kurds were in fact originally Armenian. With this theory, which occupied the media for weeks, he handily resolved several long-standing controversies: the inconvenient demographic reality that there were Kurds in Turkey (his new hypothesis helped reduce their number toward manageable irrelevance); distaste for the Alevi faith in general (how much easier to explain their apostasy if they were actually Armenians all along!); and—most efficiently—the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of Armenians who had mysteriously disappeared from the Ottoman Empire around 1915. They had simply gathered in the Eastern Anatolian region of Tunceli and reinvented themselves as Alevi Kurds, Halaçoğlu explained. This particular report came on the heels of Fethiye Çetin’s book about her Armenian grandmother; the timing suggested that it was meant as damage control in case Çetin’s book planted uncomfortable questions in too many people’s minds. Like a spin doctor for Turkish history, Halaçoğlu was always ready to work with whatever surfaced, shaping it to keep the official story straight. His efforts over the years had won him enough prominence that in 2005, the city of Ankara decided to name a downtown street after him (the plan was later abandoned when a lawyer filed suit defending the street’s existing namesake).

  The Armenian issue was not just Halaçoğlu’s personal mission, but the Turkish Historical Society’s main reason for existence. On the society’s Web site, the list of links on the home page went through the typical administrative categories like About Us and Our Staff until it got to the only option that concerned a specific subject: “Armenian Studies.” As late as 2010, similar non sequiturs were on display on many Turkish government Web sites, especially those geared toward foreigners, such as the portal for the Ministry of Tourism and Culture; their site navigation links ran something like this:

  Atatürk

  About Us

  Contact

  Site Map

  False Armenian Allegations

  * * *

  I WAS NERVOUS about my meeting with Turkey’s head historian in part because I knew how things had gone for those who came before me. Just a few months before my visit, a scholar in Sweden named David Gaunt had tried to engage with Halaçoğlu. Gaunt was widely respected as an expert on the World War I–era massacres of Assyrians and Armenians in Southeastern Turkey’s Mardin region. One day in the fall of 2006, something happened that qualified as a major event within Gaunt’s precise specialty: residents of Kuruköy, a tiny village near Mardin, found a mass grave inside a cave. The villagers took photographs and alerted the media; they said they had found similar graves before.

  Some Turkish journalists contacted Gaunt for his analysis, and when he reviewed the available evidence, he circulated a statement saying that while the location of the mass grave was used for defense works and underground storage as far back as the Roman Empire, it “was turned into a killing field during the summer of 1915. With great probability the cave should contain Armenian, but with some likelihood also Assyrian-Syrian and Chaldean, victims. But only a site investigation could tell.”

  In response, Halaçoğlu called a press conference and assured reporters that no further investigation was necessary; indeed, the grave was a Roman site, he pronounced. He challenged Gaunt to prove otherwise. So Gaunt sat down and wrote Halaçoğlu a letter. Acknowledging the politically sensitive nature of the case, he suggested they appoint a delegation of historians and archaeologists entirely disconnected from the ethnic tension—Latin Americans, perhaps. He and Halaçoğlu and other Turkish and Armenian scholars could participate, but would not lead the project. It could be a model for how a Turkish-Armenian research coalition could proceed responsibly in the future, Gaunt proposed.

  Halaçoğlu wrote back saying that before they went any further, another press release was in order.

  I spoke to Gaunt while this correspondence was in progress. Of course he was aware of Halaçoğlu’s “abysmal track record,” he said, but he could see no way to work around him. And he cringed at the thought of involving the media before a real investigation had begun. The most important issue was the intactness of the “find”—that nothing had been taken away from the site since its discovery, or, for that matter, added. He described
his worst nightmare: a TV news spot in which Halaçoğlu might kneel down, scratch a bit of earth, and—Eureka!—pick up a Roman coin that he’d cadged from a nearby museum, flashing it for the cameras.

  Gaunt persisted, writing another letter about budgeting, scale, necessary qualifications for the investigative team, the cooperation of local universities to store remains, and the possibility of a search for DNA among the living to match with those buried in the grave.

  In the Turkish newspapers, meanwhile, Halaçoğlu promised that if his Roman theory was proven wrong, he would publicly apologize to Gaunt.

  “Please,” Gaunt wrote, concluding his letter, “you do not need to do this for me and I don’t understand the necessity of your odd promise, which seems more suited for film-version samurai warriors than down-to-earth researchers. In scientific circles we are daily confronted with new interpretations, new facts, new materials, new techniques and unexpected results—and as scientists we learn from them and are not embarrassed by new knowledge. As fellow historians, I believe that our first priority must be to pay our respect to the past and honour the memory by identifying whoever is enclosed in these long lost graves, whatever ethnicity they happen to have had.” No reply came.

  At around the same time, a British-Armenian historian named Ara Sarafian, head of London’s Gomidas Institute, had been invited by Halaçoğlu to undertake a cooperative study of 1915. Sarafian was a specialist in archival scholarship of the late Ottoman era. He was known as something of a renegade, as critical of Armenian scholars as of Turkish ones. Now he, like Gaunt, tried to anticipate the problems inherent to working with Halaçoğlu by proposing a highly focused test case: a team of scholars could examine the fate of the Armenians who had lived on the Harput Plain before World War I. Halaçoğlu believed that they had been deported in an orderly manner as a necessary wartime precaution. Sarafian argued that the fate of the Harput Armenians had been significantly less orderly and significantly less benign. He outlined an examination of the sets of records that each side had been using as evidence. “What are the strengths and limitations of these materials?” Sarafian wrote in a statement describing the project. “And how can we assess these two sets of information? How far do they agree or disagree with each other?” But this project, too, was over before it started: Halaçoğlu claimed the necessary records were not available, and Sarafian moved on.